After they had received this inhuman treatment, their captors performed an act purely Missourian in its character, that is, they gave them the following note of acquittal:

TULLY, MISSOURI, July 12, 1840.

The people of Tully, having taken up Mr. Allred, with some others, and having examined into the offenses committed, find nothing to justify his detention any longer, and have released him.

By order of the committee.

H.M. WOODYARD.

As soon as the people of Commerce and vicinity were informed of this outrage, Gentiles as well as Mormons were loud in their condemnation of it, and at once a mass meeting was called, and resolutions were adopted, expressing their unqualified indignation, and calling upon the governor of Illinois to take the necessary steps to punish those who had committed this outrage, and by vindicating the law, give the Missourians to understand there was a limit beyond which their deeds of violence must not pass.

D.H. Wells, not then a member of The Church, and George Miller were appointed a committee to wait upon Governor Carlin, and lay the case before him. For this purpose they repaired to Quincy, and at the recital of the cruelties practiced upon the men who were the victims of the Missourians, the governor's wife, who was present at the interview, was moved to tears, and the governor himself was greatly agitated. He promised to counsel with the State attorney, who by law was made his adviser, and promised to take such steps as the case seemed to require, and the law to justify. Just what was done by Governor Carlin, however, I am unable to learn; but one thing is certain, and that is, the guilty parties were never brought to justice, nor even to a trial—indeed it may be that even then the love which Governor Carlin once had for the Saints, and which at last became dead, had begun to grow cold.

Scarcely had the excitement occasioned by the kidnapping of Allred and his associates subsided, when Governor Boggs of Missouri made a requisition on Governor Carlin, of Illinois, for the persons of Joseph Smith, Jr., Sidney Rigdon, Lyman Wight, P.P. Pratt, Caleb Baldwin and Alanson Brown, as fugitives from justice. Governor Carlin granted the requisition—was it another case of Herod and Pilate being made friends over the surrender of God's Prophet? But fortunately when the sheriff went to Commerce with his requisition, Joseph and his brethren were not at home, and could not be found; so that the officers returned without them. These men were not fugitives from justice, no process had ever been found against them, the governor himself had connived at their escape from the hands of the officers charged with the duty of conducting them from Liberty, Clay County, to Boone County;[[1]] and these men did not feel disposed to try again "the solemn realities of mob law in Missouri."

These circumstances gave the Saints to understand that their peace in their beautiful situation on the banks of the placid, grand, old Mississippi was not to be without alloy; the goal of their final triumph and rest had not been reached. These incidents were a premonition of danger; they were indeed the few drops of rain which sometimes precede the storm, but a kind Providence shut out from their vision how fierce that storm would be, or how would they have had the courage to meet it?

Footnotes

[1]. Missouri Persecutions, Chapter XLVII.

CHAPTER XIV.

FOUNDING A CITY.